Constable/Landscape after the death of Constable
LANDSCAPE AFTER THE DEATH OF CONSTABLE
During the first half of the nineteenth century, England and France were the only two countries of Europe where art was sufficiently alert to catch the innovations of Constable and experiment with them. Each nation used his discoveries, but with a difference of result corresponding to the difference between the two national characters. English landscape has remained local, and is practically unknown on the Continent. The complex ramifications of French realism have had an enormous influence upon the art of the world, and have spread to every country where oil-painting is practised. It will therefore be best to deal with France, before surveying the narrower paths of English landscape since the death of Constable.
When we think of French culture and talent we are apt to form a false opinion of them, from associating them either with work done in periods of unusual social or political excitement, with the neurotic products of over-civilized city life, or with intellects that are French only by geographical accident. We may thus lose sight of the essential character of the French genius, and forget that Racine is perhaps its truest type; that if it inherits the excitability of its Roman progenitors, it also inherits (at least in the Arts) the Roman sense of style, proportion, and logic.
In 1824, when Constable's pictures first appeared in Paris, the country had not fully recovered from the shock and stress of the Revolution, and was still bent on endowing Art and Literature with the freedom which had already been gained in politics. It was a time of reaction against the stereotyping of the national characteristics, which had resulted from centuries of absolute monarchy. The pictures of Constable and of the brilliant shallow Bonington were welcomed, as the writings of Scott and Byron had been welcomed, not so much for their actual merit, though this was generally admitted and sometimes exaggerated, but as indicating the lines on which the desired departure was possible.
In the course of a century and a half the logical side of the French character had stiffened the stern canons of Poussin till they had lost all relation either to nature or to art. The revolt from this academic severity was of necessity violent. Its leaders met with bitter opposition, while even those who tried to effect some kind of compromise could not escape scot-free. The life of Theodore Rousseau, who bore the brunt of the attack, is one long series of struggles and rebuffs, with but brief intervals of rest and success. To some extent, undoubtedly, the painter himself was to blame. An eternal striving for nature and for novelty too often overstrained a technical accomplishment that was far from complete, so that he is frequently unworthy of his reputation. He lacked the stores of experience that Constable had accumulated by unceasing study of the old masters, and in their place had little more than the intention of being sincere at all costs.
To catch the broken shifting forms of clouds and trees in motion, Constable had discarded the shapely brush-strokes which had characterized all fine painting before his time, and, towards the end of his life, indulged in pats and dots and scrapings of pigment applied with the palette-knife. Nevertheless, he retained much of the traditional breadth and simplicity in the shadows and other quiet portions of his work. Courbet, in the effort to get away from academic methods, did all he could to prevent his touch from being shapely. His pictures, in consequence, are sometimes little more than expanses of rough, worried, clumsy paint. Constable based his work upon a chiaroscuro sketch in monochrome which united the colours and tones and masses into a connected whole. Courbet trusted to chance for unity, and therefore did not always get it. Constable glazed with great care, delicacy, and skill. Courbet, where he did not leave his paint raw just as it came from his brush, was content with a general rubbing of thin colour.
In the work of Corot and Millet the effects of the Revolution were less marked, for both, like Constable, never forgot the main points of the traditional technique. In Corot we get the modern raw pigment, the modern spottiness, the modern shapeless brushwork, but his pictures are built on a monochrome foundation in the manner of Claude, while the artist's natural taste prevents the modernity of the colour and handling from being obtrusive. Millet was the great modern master of chiaroscuro. Unity therefore came naturally to him, yet, to make certainty still more certain, his toiling figures and stern landscape are bathed in the warm atmosphere of the old masters.
Millet, indeed, is a standing refutation of the idea that the modern attitude towards nature is incompatible with traditional methods of painting. His peasants are more like real peasants than those of anyone else, while his landscape suggests the weather and the time of day with a simple directness that makes the work of other painters look fantastic or laboured. His brushwork is often rather clumsy, for he never quite mastered the heaviness of hand he inherited from generations of peasant ancestors, but it is clumsy only in comparison with that of the great painters of the past. In any collection of modern work it would become by contrast quite shapely and classical.
The efforts of Rousseau and Courbet towards absolute realism were continued by Manet and Monet. In many respects the results obtained by Monet may be regarded as final, for his painting imitates the light and colour of nature as exactly as is possible with the artistic materials hitherto discovered. Such a remarkable degree of accuracy could only be obtained by the sacrifice of all that was usually considered essential to good painting. Design became a matter of chance, because nature was not to be altered or adapted. Ordered harmony of colour, for the same reason, became almost impossible. Fine painting was discarded because the mixing of pigments on the palette or even on the canvas involved some loss of luminosity. In order to make the nearest possible approach to the pitch of natural sunlight, pure pigment had to be used. To retain this purity each tone in nature was analyzed into its chromatic components, and small pats of the primary colours were placed side by side direct on the canvas, in such proportions that their united effect would produce the complex tone required.
The method had certain advantages. It allowed strong effects of light and colour to be rendered with great vigour and accuracy, while the infinite number of small spots of paint suggested the natural vibration of the atmosphere. Whether Monet's work can always be called art, is another matter. Monet's aim was scientific truth, and scientific truth has no inevitable relation to art. The aim of art, however one defines it, must always be closely connected with beauty, and it is undeniable that Monet's painting, though always interesting, is not always beautiful. His spotty raw pigment is a positively unpleasant substance. His colour is harmonious or inharmonious, his design good or indifferent, in exact correspondence with the pictorial qualities of the subject in hand. As his subjects were usually chosen as materials for scientific experiment, their pictorial qualities are a mere matter of chance, and sometimes are slight enough.
Monet's ablest successors seem to have realized that this logical culmination of realism was also its reductio ad absurdum. The present tendency is in favour of very direct painting in fresh colour, but some discretion is exercised in the choice of subjects whose tones and colours are naturally harmonious. The paintings of Harpignies might serve as examples of such a compromise, while Cazin, by whom the method is combined with a vein of pensive poetry, has achieved results that, in their way, are charming. Of the landscape of Puvis de Chavannes this is hardly the place to speak. Had Constable never lived, Puvis de Chavannes might have worked in a more conventional key, but it is unlikely that the amazing originality of his genius would have failed to evolve the nobly spaced design, the frank use of silhouette, and the tranquil silver atmosphere that give him a place apart from the other artists of the nineteenth century. Some of his best qualities are found also in the work of his countryman, Professor Legros, where the ever-present memory of Rembrandt and Poussin makes them appear almost familiar.
Among the other Continental schools of landscape, that of Holland takes the first place. The Dutch have for centuries been a race of painters, so that in their hands the modern fashion in realism has not been carried to any absurd extremity, however apparent the French influence in their work may be. Their colour, if often too cold or too raw to be quite pleasant, is never violent or uncouth. Nevertheless, their dexterous compromise between art and nature has not the scientific interest of Monet's experiments, the real grandeur and force underlying the struggles of Rousseau, or the profound insight of Millet. Matthys Maris, it is true, is something of a visionary, whose dreams often recall the poetry of Corot; but he is a solitary exception. The other Dutchmen paint absolutely in the spirit of their forefathers, turning out pictures of everyday life, soundly worked in the prevalent manner, of convenient size, and with no special emphasis or intention, for that might repel the average purchaser. Their output might, in fact, be open to the accusation of pot-boiling, were it not usually free from the cheap sentiment which the term generally connotes.
The garish vigour of Boecklin in Germany, and of Segantini in Italian Switzerland, has at least the merit of definite personality. This is more than can be said for the average work of their countrymen, who seem to be attracted only by what is showy and superficial in art and nature. Meunier, best known as a sculptor, has painted the forges and blast-furnaces of the Belgian Black Country with a sympathy and power that often remind one of Millet; though a certain outward uncouthness, which in Millet was a natural defect, appears with Meunier to have become a mannerism. Thaulow, the observer of Norwegian snows and floods, is a more attractive but less serious artist. His handling is skilfully varied, while his subjects are chosen with great taste in the matter of colour and arrangement, and are treated with an intimate affection that makes his painting popular as well as personal. In this respect Thaulow's work may be regarded as a sort of half-way house between Continental landscape and that of the British school.
On the Continent, under the leadership of the scientific spirit of France, painters have uniformly viewed Constable as the pioneer of new possibilities in the way of realistic interpretation of natural light and air. In England, even before Constable's death, the artistic world had become accustomed to a moderate degree of realism, owing to the example of the water-colour painters, and was content to go no further. The country was resting complacently after the strain of the Napoleonic wars, and insisted that its art should be something comfortable, something incapable of rousing any strong emotion. Even Turner's fame could not protect him from the jeers of the cultured classes when he grappled with problems of storm or blazing sunlight. It is hardly wonderful, then, that the lesser men should have settled down deliberately to turn out frankly popular pictures, which are still the small change of dealers and auctioneers.
The general attitude of these men may be summed up in the verdict of a French critic upon Millais—pour amuser le gentry. In Constable they saw only a painter of pretty rusticity; trim cottages, green fields, brown cows, blue skies, and soft pink clouds. They stippled their work all over, to give it the smoothness which a dunce mistakes for finish. They brightened the colours, so that their stuff might "tell" on a crowded Academy wall. They took care to eliminate everything which might conflict with the air of simpering prosperous respectability, which the patriotic Briton expected from the agricultural classes. Did our yokels always wear such brilliantly white linen, such scarlet caps and coats? Did English milkmaids always brave the elements in the piquant dishabille of convention? Was the sky always a bright chalky blue? Were the clouds always scattered and woolly? Was there always a dot of vermilion somewhere in the foreground, when those innumerable "landscapes with figures" were manufactured by the popular pets of the forties and fifties and sixties and seventies?
That these amiable pot-boiling tradesmen should have appreciated the grand restraint of Titian, the vigour of Rubens, or the intensity of Rembrandt would have been too much to expect, but there is no excuse for their neglect of the noble elements in the genius of their own countryman, Constable. Had they ever looked carefully at nature, and possessed any but the meanest ambitions, they could hardly have failed to sympathize with the sailing clouds of The Cornfield and The Valley Farm, the glistening meadows of The Leaping Horse, the storm and rainbow of the large Salisbury Cathedral, the tremendous desolation of The Old Sarum, or the hush that falls with the twilight of The Cenotaph. For those who are really interested in art there is no gradation in the things that are not art, so that to discuss the descent of certain successful moderns from Creswick or Shayer or Lee or Witherington would be entirely futile.
To such an extent has British landscape been vitiated by this taint of commerce, that it is hard to name more than a few painters and a few pictures which are free from it. Cox and De Wint, in spite of considerable natural gifts, practically succumbed to the necessity of doing small drawings that would sell readily. What Cox might have done under happier circumstances may be guessed from the magnificent drawing at Kensington of a storm sweeping over a moor; while a very large study of a waterfall, also in water-colour, exhibited at the Guildhall some years ago, showed a feeling for space and a sympathy with the grandeur of a great cataract that recall the noble conceptions of Hokusai. De Wint was a less gifted man, but his two landscapes in oil at South Kensington make one regret that he did not use that medium more frequently. The view over a wooded country, with a river winding among the trees far away, is especially notable for the perfection of its cool silvery colour.
The clever theatrical sketching of Müller was more directly indebted to Constable, but, like the laborious accumulations of John Linnell, it deserves no lengthy notice. Frederick Walker and George Mason are more definite links between the old art and the new. In their work there is a real attempt at definite design: though their conception of the world is merely pretty, their colour has too often an unpleasant tendency towards pinkness, and they always paint to catch the public eye. They certainly may claim to have inherited something of Constable's affection for English country life, and we should perhaps be more inclined to pardon their cheap graces and their sentimentality, were they not imitated and diluted by our feebler contemporaries. With them Cecil Lawson must be classed. His early death is often supposed to have been a heavy loss to English art, but his extant work is hardly strong enough to warrant the supposition. It is well intentioned, safe in colour, and fairly accomplished, but such qualities do not go very far towards the making of a really great painter.
The landscape work of Ford, Madox Brown, and the other artists associated with the Preraphaelite fraternity, in spite of occasional similarity in outward aspect, has no real connection with the work of Constable. The Preraphaelite realism was a realism of fact. The realism of Constable was a realism of effect. The difference can easily be understood if we think for a moment of three of our modern marine painters, Brett, Hook, and Henry Moore. Brett might serve as an example of a worker on principles akin to those of the Preraphaelites, while Hook and Henry Moore would represent the point of view of Constable. Of the last two painters Hook seems to have best understood Constable's true excellence. His composition is sound and sometimes original, his handling is skilful, and his colour harmonious, except in the figures. Henry Moore had a tendency to mistake violence for strength. He dispensed with conventional composition, and never quite found a substitute for it. He used in his large pictures the raw colour and shapeless handling that were an unavoidable necessity when he sketched his shifting skies and foaming waves from nature. His paintings thus lack the design, the harmony, and the pleasant pigment which one finds in Hook; but the sea of Henry Moore is undoubtedly more like the real thing than anything else ever done. With Hook the direct influence of Constable comes to an end. Landscapes, it is true, are still turned out by the hundred, which at the first glance might seem to be reminiscences of Constable, for the subjects are rustic as were his, and are treated in a straightforward realistic manner. The realism, however, is marked by a certain incoherence of design and colour, which prevents such work from being artistic, and the rusticity has become mechanical from lack of that intimacy and affection which made Constable the first true painter of the country.
The best work done in England of recent years has been done by the painters who have inherited the tradition of Constable indirectly through the science of Monet or the poetry of Corot. Such work may not be great art, but it is frequently good art, for its primary impulse has been the creation of something beautiful. If the search for dignity, simplicity, and repose may sometimes seem to have been carried too far, so that one finds oneself wishing for a wider outlook, for more deliberately planned brushwork, or a more vehement emotional impulse, it is well to remember that dignity, simplicity, and repose are not only enough in themselves to make good art, but that they have always been uncommon qualities in painting, and never more so than at present.
The landscape work of some members of the Glasgow school might perhaps suggest a more direct descent from Constable on account of the roughness of their handling, the freshness of their colour, their recognition of the sky as a compositional quantity, and the air of breezy vigour which pervades them. Their naturalism, however, differs radically from that of Constable in the method of its adaptation to pictorial purposes, in that it is governed by the principles of ordered selection that characterize the art of the Far East. The true culmination of these ideals is found in the exquisite landscapes of Mr. Whistler, where there is but little that can be attributed to the influence of Constable, whether direct or indirect. Indeed, in some respects it represents the diametrically opposite point of view. Constable's work is really done in the manner of Rembrandt; that is to say, it is unified by a chiaroscuro scheme into which the local colour is worked. Mr. Whistler's painting is really done in the manner of Harunobu; that is to say, it is unified by the rhythmic iteration of certain selected notes of colour. If, then, we compare Constable with the most perfect development of contemporary landscape, it will be seen that he is not only the first of the moderns, but perhaps was also the last of our old masters.